TextMaker: Should we support FreeBSD at all?

[Paul Robinson]

> From: Martin Kotulla [mailto:martin-k at softmaker.de] 
>
> Paul:
> 
> OK, second attempt to answer that. I replied through a newsgroup but 
> didn't realize that this mail2news gate didn't propagate back 
> my post. 

No problem. ;-)

> TextMaker has a list price of $49.95. As soon as our 
> additional office 
> suite components (PlanMaker, DataMaker) become available, there will 
> also be an office suite-type package.

That's quite reasonable. Around the same price point as StarOffice.
 
> We already have the trial version. It is undergoing a bit 
> more testing, 
> and we'll make it available in the next couple of days.

Let us know when it is, and I'll take a look.
 
> TextMaker for Linux already worked very nicely under Linux 
> emulation on 
> FreeBSD and NetBSD.

That doesn't surprise me at all. I'll bet you $5 that it ran faster on
FBSD under Linux emul than it did on Linux too. :-)
 
> We did the port (a) because it was easy (just one source code change) 
> and (b) there were a couple of people telling us they'd never 
> consider 
> running the Linux emulator on *BSD, and (c) because we could ... <g>

Fair enough. So it doesn't cost you anything to natively support FreeBSD
in effect? Could we perhaps ask you to do a bit of advocacy about how
easy it all was for you? It would act as marketing for you, and might
help us win a few battles with some of the people we slowly want to
start coming over to us. E.g. Macromedia, Oracle, shock-horror even MS!
 
> That's what irritates me. TextMaker on the vast majority of 
> systems is 
> MUCH faster than OpenOffice, even faster than Abiword. It 
> should load in 
> one or two seconds and redraw much faster than OO. I guess 
> we'll have to 
> wait till the trial version to get a better sampling of TextMaker's 
> behaviour on FreeBSD.

Yup.
 
> One situation where TextMaker will be slow is on systems with 
> less than 
> 16 bits of color. Apart from that, TextMaker should RACE on 
> systems, not 
> the opposite.

How does that work? Why does its performance rely on colour depth?
 
> By many accounts, TextMaker already has better Word import and export 
> than OpenOffice, and we are continually improving it. We are 

Oh, nice. If that's true I'll buy it.

> Well, there ARE magazines with *BSD coverage, at least here 
> in Germany. 
> So I think that question was legitimate ...

Yeah, sure. It's just that in the UK, it's a dry wasteland really. Maybe
it's time for me to write a few articles and tout them around some of
the mainstream magazines.

Thanks for your support of our OS. I for one, look forward to seeing
more from you in the future.